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PaulRH wrote:
As to your objection:

I thought the pastor made it very clear that sin is sin & God will not tolerate it. Nor would the church:

"The Bible teaches that all of us are sinners, and though God always loves us, He hates our sin and calls us to repentance and holiness. The Bible is clear that homosexual practices are unwelcome to God. We are a Bible church, and as the scriptures would never affirm a gay relationship as good and acceptable to God, neither would we."

Thanks to your response, Paul, I now see that Pastor McQuitty did indeed use a small portion of his letter to address "sin."

However, it was lost in a virtual sea of love and grace.

I mean, I was looking for the "sin" and I couldn't find it.

Perhaps that is what is wrong with modern evangelism: we are mostly grace and just a little bit sin.

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I am pretty sure that Jesus start His public ministry with "Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!"

And we need look no further in the Bible than Deuteronomy 28 to see just how much God wants obedience and just how much He hates sin: the chapter starts with 14 verses of "Blessing for obedience" and is then followed by 53 brutal verses of "Curses for Disobedience."

God's point?

He knows our sinful natures. He knows that we need four times the reminder of sin than we do the reminders of His blessed promises.

And if we are to be God-blessed ambassadors of God's Holy and precious Gospel, I believe that we need to be that "heavy handed" in our handling of sin in our evangelism.

To God goes the glory,
Ted